Acer unveils touchscreen version of C720 Chromebook for $299 [update]

Less RAM, more storage accompanies touchscreen with price bump

Update: The new C720P Chromebook is now up for pre-order on amazon at the link below.

Original story​: Acer is building out a third version of its latest Chromebook platform, and this time the biggest notable feature is the addition of a touchscreen. This new C720P model is all but identical to the other C720's currently available, with the same chassis, screen size and ports, with just a few internal tweaks and of course the touchscreen. That screen is the same 11.6-inches across and 1366 x 768 resolution, but now has capacitive touch.

As for internals you're getting the same Haswell micro-architecture Celeron 2955U processor as the original C720, 32GB of storage rather than the 16GB found in the other models but a bump down to just 2GB of RAM from 4GB found in the original. For ports you have one USB 2.0 port, one USB 3.0 port, SDcard slot and HDMI out.

While performance of the touchscreen is yet to be known, it's a big deal to see Acer shipping a touchscreen Chromebook for such a low price. The Chromebook Pixel gave us an early look at what it's like to use Chrome OS on a touchscreen device, but at $1000 more than this upcoming C720P, it isn't much of a mass-market device.

Acer says the C720P will be on sale from Amazon, Best Buy and from Acer directly in early December.

Is there really a worry about running into RAM issues on a device like this? Seems like the OS is pretty light weight as are most of the apps (though this could be completely wrong as I have no experience with Chrome OS).

Hard to say that it's "based" on one model. All three C720's are nearly identical. $199 w/ 2GB of RAM, 16GB storage; $249 w/ 4GB of RAM, 16GB storage; or $299 with touchscreen, 2GB of RAM and 32GB storage.

Still, 4 GB of RAM + 16 GB at $299 or even $349 would've been nice. That's how much I paid for my HP Chromebook 14 (with 4 GB of RAM), and I am absolutely in love with this thing. The extra RAM is comforting, and the extra storage space really isn't needed on a device like this (it's why I have a 64 GB Micro SD card).

That's what I am wondering, the OS is light and the functionality is rather limited compared to a full OS like Windows. I don't see a ton of need for four gigs of RAM but like I said up above, I have no experience with Chrome Books so maybe some people have run into limited RAM issues.

Do Chromebooks support Flash for the Chrome Browser? My daughter has an ipad, but she's always using my wife's macbook air to visit websites that use flash. It seems that there aren't any apps that she likes for her barbie.com needs!

I was thinking of getting her one for Christmas before she breaks the macbook air.

I'm getting this for my daughter for Xmas! I will add 4GB of ram (if upgradable), if not, 2GB it is. As for the SSD, I have a 128GB Crucial M4 right here ready to go! Again, if not upgradable, 32GB it is.

Chrome OS brings nothing to the table for me, but if I could install Linux on it, that wouldn't be a bad purchase- however 2GB ram is a huge turn off, especially in this day and age where ram requirements for many things is going up.

I thought the same thing until my Acer 720p purchase .. and then pushing it to its limits (which I've barely seen). Being the ADHD TabMonster I am, I've been amazed at how well ChromeOS manages resources with all my open tabs on 2GB RAM. (I sometimes end up with 30 tabs a window, with 3 or 4 windows ... during my best / worst ADHD R&D moments ;)

As a comparison, I had to use OneTab on my MacBook Pro 16GB -- just to keep my resources in check and avoid massive disk swapping, etc.

I'm surprised and pretty delighted ... though I've yet to really push the Ubuntu side. Indeed, that may be quite a different story. However, when I purchased the ChromeBook, I did so with the clear intention of deferring most computational work to cloud instances (Linode, Digital Ocean, Cloud 9, etc.). So everything I've been able to do "locally" has just been more like a revelation.

I think 2GB is perfectly fine for now, but if any resource-intensive applications go to the web in the next year, it's going to fall flat. At some point we *will* see serious games and content creation applications in the browser, but I don't think it's possible to guess when.

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